Systems with handwriting recognition include electronic notebooks and personal digital assistants (PDAs), which are portable computers incorporating a touch screen graphics display; and also non-portable computer workstations equipped with a digitising tablet and graphics display. Both types of systems have a pen input function when the user draws or writes with a stylus on the surface of the touch screen or digitising tablet. For handwritten data entry, such systems utilize a graphical user interface (GUI) presenting two spatially separate visual fields on the graphics display: first, a field where text characters are to be inserted by a text editing software program into a document (display field), usually showing a cursor to indicate the point of insertion for character data; and second, one or more fields (entry fields), where the user draws with the stylus to enter handwritten data.
After recognition and conversion of the handwritten data, the resulting character data appear in the display field at the point of insertion indicated by the cursor. In a typical design, not only are the entry and display fields spatially separate, but also the position, size, location, and other features of the character data bear little relation to the appearance of the original handwritten input.
When the stylus is moved outside of an entry field, it typically operates as a pointing device to invoke other functions of the computer, such as editing text contained in the display field, and changing the insertion point in the display field.
Typical prior methods of data entry with a stylus present the following difficulties to the user.
1) visual attention must constantly be shifted between the entry and display fields;
2) the stylus must be moved repeatedly between the display fields, to perform editing functions, and the entry fields, to continue entering handwritten data;
3) the separate entry fields may use as much as one half of the available graphics display area on a small hand-held device such as a PDA, reducing the amount of other information that can be displayed;
4) often, users must select the desired writing mode (characters, numbers, punctuation) and may forget which writing mode is currently active, or may enter the wrong type of handwritten symbol in an entry field; and
5) in many systems each entry field accepts a single character only, which must be recognized before the system will accept further handwritten data.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved means of data entry and editing by superimposing the input field and the display field on a GUI. It is a further object of the invention to provide an interface in which graphic symbols are entered by the user in an input field, and then are immediately replaced with the symbols' corresponding character data in approximately the same location. It is yet a further object of the invention to provide a means of correcting and editing character data without moving the stylus outside the input field.